Experiences about IE 11 performance / support?

Hi,

I was wondering what kind of experiences people have regarding FPS performance when running playcanvas games in IE 11 browser. I’ve got a bit old laptop with Windows 7 that I’m using for development and on my laptop all playcanvas games run really slow with IE 11. Chrome and Firefox run just fine. Also, I noticed that actually it’s not just playcanvas, but all webgl content that run really bad for me. Even MS’s own http://www.fishgl.com/ test site runs at 1 FPS for me on IE11.

I’m considering if I should detect the browser and warn IE users on the page where I will be hosting a playcanvas game. Anyone else having similar experiences about IE running playcanvas games really slow? Or is it just me with my too old laptop?

Toni

Hi Toni. It’s the same for me on my Dell M4500 Precision workstation running Windows 8.1. The machine has a NVIDIA® Quadro FX 1800M GPU. Apparently, this GPU cannot run WebGL content in hardware, so it falls back to software rendering, resulting in very poor performance. It seems that Microsoft expect people to upgrade to reasonably recent GPUs in order to run WebGL content in hardware in IE. Presumably, this is related to security considerations. Personally, I decided to upgrade my laptop, which now runs WebGL content in IE just fine.

I believe you see a message printed to the JavaScript console warning that hardware acceleration is not available, but that’s from memory.

Hey Toni,

according to public mailing list of Khronos WebGL group, people from MS are working very hard right now and I heard some rummors IE11+ might become killer platform. If something doesn’t work I hope it is just temporal state. They started so late and a lot of things are not done yet.

Will,
shouldnt it fallback from nvidia to intel? WebGL is superfast even with haswell. I guess your nvidia is dedicated. (Or at least it should be possible to set with nvidia driver.)

Hi @entityblack. No, there is no integrated Intel GPU in my Dell laptop. The nVidia GPU is the only option unfortunately. :frowning:

Hi,

Thanks for the info. I decided to implement a simple FPS counter and I’m showing a notification to players if it appears the game is running way too slow.

Here’s a tip for determining if IE is running in software mode. Go to http://webglreport.com/ and look for the following:

Unmasked Renderer: Microsoft Basic Render Driver
Major Performance Caveat: Yes

Hello how to get Major Performance Caveat enabled on Firefox? thanks

Sorry, are you saying that you are getting Major Performance Caveat reported in Firefox when visiting http://webglreport.com? If so, I suspect your graphics card drivers need updating. If you do this and still have a problem, what is your GPU, OS and Firefox version?